The present invention relates generally to a system and method for electronically managing remote review of documents for legal purposes. More specifically, the invention relates to an improved system and method for permitting stand-alone remote review of the documents while providing integration with a repository where the documents are electronically stored.
Legal matters often involve massive volumes of information that must be organized and categorized in response to particular inquiries or issues, such as litigation pleadings, business transactions, government regulations, etc. The information is typically managed by a centralized organization, such as a legal department or group therein having document coordinators. Managing this documentary information often requires the review and input of persons remote or external to the centralized organization, such as other attorneys, business persons, or experts. The remote reviewers are typically requested to provide their opinion or decision on the categorization and treatment of the information for a particular legal matter, for example, such as to produce or not produce in response to a discovery request. At times there may be numerous remote reviewers reviewing numerous sets or subsets of documents whose decisions must be recorded. Also, conflicting decisions must be identified and reconciled with each other. It must also be ensured that the decisions of the remote reviewers are correctly matched back to the exact same document or version of the document for which their input is being sought.
Existing methods for remote document review are time-consuming and not easily managed, tracked, recorded and reconciled. For example, the central document coordinator identifies a set of documents from the central repository needing external review. The external reviewers are typically located remote from the central document repository and are barred from accessing the repository in order to protect integrity of the documents stored in the repository. Thus, the coordinator prepares paper copies of the documents for review and sends them out to each of the remote reviewers for their stand-alone, external review. The coordinator manually ensures that the information sent for review is appropriately restricted, such as by removing privileged documents or portions thereof. The coordinator also has to somehow indicate the decisions that are requested for each of the documents, by manually creating a letter or other type of notice to the reviewer for the documents. The coordinator has no convenient way to track the status of the outstanding remote review requests.
Under existing review methods, the remote reviewers return the paper documents together with a particular decision—such as produce, do not produce, mark as privileged, defer to another reviewer, etc. . . . The returned documents are not necessarily in any particular order. As to each document, the coordinator must identify and resolve any conflicting decisions of different remote reviewers and any conflicts with prior decisions stored in the repository. This is typically done document by document—such as by manually sorting the documents or using a crude spreadsheet listing the documents and all of the current and prior decisions. The coordinator must also manually transfer any redactions and decisions onto the centralized document copy for the particular legal matter. Typically there is no historical record of decisions by the remote reviewer except in the paper file of that particular legal matter or as marked on the reviewer's document copy. Thus, the same or related reviewer may review the same documents for the same or a similar inquiry over and over again—sometimes even inadvertently being inconsistent with their prior decisions. Furthermore, other than the coordinator handling the specific legal matter, no other coordinator has ready access to decisions that have been made on a particular document by a remote reviewer except by finding and reviewing the paper documents for the other related legal matter. This can be especially problematic for documents that have been previously categorized as privileged.
In some instances, due to the time-consuming tracking effort involved, the final decision of the last remote reviewer may not necessarily be logged back into the central repository and recorded with the particular document and legal matter.
Thus, it is desirable to be able to easily identify, restrict, transmit, and track the documents sent to a remote reviewer, and to readily integrate the review decisions back into a centralized document repository. Further, it is desirable to easily match the decisions back to the correct document in the repository as well as to identify and reconcile any conflicting review decisions against prior decisions made as to the documents. It is also desirable to be able to easily identify any missing or otherwise deficient or incomplete decisions by the reviewers. Additionally, it is desirable to maintain the integrity of the documents stored in the centralized repository as well as easily record and store the historical review decisions in respect to the documents.